Humble Inquiry Quotes

Rather than swallowing our pride and simply asking what we do not know, we choose to fill in the blanks ourselves and later become humbled. Wisdom was often, in its youth, proven foolish, and ones humiliated were meant to become wise.

we do not think and talk about what we see; we see what we are able to think and talk about.

Most of my important lessons about life have come from recognizing how others from a different culture view things.

Questions are taken for granted rather than given a starring role in the human drama. Yet all my teaching and consulting experience has taught me that what builds a relationship, what solves problems, what moves things forward is asking the right questions.

we must become better at asking and do less telling in a culture that overvalues telling. It

Our charge is not to ‘save the world’ after all,” (activist Courtney Martin)’s written. “It is to live in it, flawed and fierce, loving and humble.

Our wants and needs distort to an unknown degree what we perceive. We block out a great deal of information that is potentially available if it does not fit our needs, expectations, preconceptions, and prejudgments.

The dilemma in U.S. culture is that we don’t really distinguish what I am defining as Humble Inquiry carefully enough from leading questions, rhetorical questions, embarrassing questions, or statements in the form of questions—such as journalists seem to love— which are deliberately provocative and intended to put you down.

Telling puts the other person down. It implies that the other person does not already know what I am telling and that the other person ought to know it.

we value task accomplishment over relationship building and either are not aware of this cultural bias or, worse, don’t care and don’t want to be bothered with it.

Telling is only an investment if you know for sure that what you are telling is of value to the other person. That is why it is safest to tell only if you have been asked, rather than arrogantly deciding on your own to tell somebody something.

For there are some who have such a presumptuous opinion of their own ability that they deem themselves able to measure the nature of everything; I mean to say that, in their estimation, everything is true that seems to them so, and everything is false that does not. So that the human mind, therefore, might be freed from this presumption and come to a humble inquiry after truth, it was necessary that some things should be proposed to man by God that would completely surpass his intellect.

Gratuitous telling betrays three kinds of arrogance: (1) that you think you know more than the person you’re telling, (2) that your knowledge is the correct knowledge, and (3) that you have the right to structure other people’s experience for them.

It is important in thinking about this lens to separate two ideas that are too often synonymous in the mind of the public: the practice of science and the scientific worldview that it feeds. Science is the process of revealing the world through rational inquiry. The practice of doing real science brings the questioner into an unparalleled intimacy with nature fraught with wonder and creativity as we try to comprehend the mysteries of the more-than-human world. Trying to understand the life of another being or another system so unlike our own is often humbling and, for many scientists, is a deeply spiritual pursuit.

…the life which we, at any rate, can best lead to the glory of God at present is the learned life. By leading that life to the glory of God I do not, of course, mean any attempt to make our intellectual inquiries work out to edifying conclusions…I mean the pursuit of knowledge and beauty, in a sense, for their own sake, but in a sense which does not exclude their being for God’s sake. An appetite for these things exists in the human mind, and God makes no appetite in vain. We can therefore pursue knowledge as such, and beauty as such, in the sure confidence that by so doing we are either advancing to the vision of God ourselves or indirectly helping others to do so. Humility, no less than the appetite, encourages us to concentrate simply on the knowledge or the beauty, not too much concerning ourselves with their ultimate relevance to the vision of God. That relevance may not be intended for us but for our betters—for men who come after and find the spiritual significance of what we dug out in blind and humble obedience to our vocation.

Saying to oneself that one should ask more and tell less does not solve the problem of building a relationship of mutual trust. The underlying attitude of competitive one-upmanship will leak out if it is there. Humble Inquiry starts with the attitude and is then supported by our choice of questions. The more we remain curious about the other person rather than letting our own expectations and preconceptions creep in, the better our chances are of staying in the right questioning mode. We have to learn that diagnostic and confrontational questions come very naturally and easily, just as telling comes naturally and easily. It takes some discipline and practice to access one’s ignorance, to stay focused on the other person.

Don’t we all know how to ask questions? Of course we think we know how to ask, but we fail to notice how often even our questions are just another form of telling—rhetorical or just testing whether what we think is right. We are biased toward telling instead of asking because we live in a pragmatic, problem-solving culture in which knowing things and telling others what we know is valued.

Christianity, then, was in one sense the stone these builders of the American nation rejected, except for Benjamin Rush and Charles Carroll. Yet the other Founding Fathers, even as modern men, still held fast to much that was good from the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Jefferson's enthusiasm for the defense of reason, natural law, and the principle of subsidiarity is worthy of the best Christian thinkers. And there could be no better advice (properly understood) for any age than Franklin's "imitation of Jesus and Socrates, " for man needs humbly to live both the life of the spirit and the intellect. But it was the most unlikely of all of them, the Caesarist Alexander Hamilton, who, laying down his life for an enemy, proved that the lives and thought of the Founding Fathers - even in the heady days of the American revolution - could be completely transformed. Obedient to Christ's command of absolute love, Hamilton died very much in the manner of those other and greater figures of destiny, those who build the futures of two worlds, the only true revolutionaries - the saints.

In airplane crashes and chemical industry accidents, in the infrequent but serious nuclear plant accidents, in the NASA Challenger and Columbia disasters, and in the British Petroleum gulf spill, a common finding is that lower-ranking employees had information that would have prevented or lessened the consequences of the accident, but either it was not passed up to higher levels, or it was ignored, or it was overridden. When I talk to senior managers, they always assure me that they are open, that they want to hear from their subordinates, and that they take the information seriously. However, when I talk to the subordinates in those same organizations, they tell me either they do not feel safe bringing bad news to their bosses or they’ve tried but never got any response or even acknowledgment, so they concluded that their input wasn’t welcome and gave up. Shockingly often, they settled for risky alternatives rather than upset their bosses with potentially bad news. When I look at what goes on in hospitals, in operating rooms, and in the health care system generally, I find the same problems of communication exist and that patients frequently pay the price. Nurses and technicians do not feel safe bringing negative information to doctors or correcting a doctor who is about to make a mistake. Doctors will argue that if the others were “professionals” they would speak up, but in many a hospital the nurses will tell you that doctors feel free to yell at nurses in a punishing way, which creates a climate where nurses will certainly not speak up. Doctors engage patients in one-way conversations in which they ask only enough questions to make a diagnosis and sometimes make misdiagnoses because they don’t ask enough questions before they begin to tell patients what they should do.

What you have to do, if you get caught in this gumption trap of value rigidity, is slow down – you’re going to have to slow down anyway whether you want to or not – but slow down deliberately and go over ground that you’ve been over before to see if the things you thought were important were really important and to . . . well . . . just stare at the machine. There’s nothing wrong with that. Just live with it for a while. Watch it the way you watch a line when fishing and before long, as sure as you live, you’ll get a little nibble, a little fact asking in a timid, humble way if you’re interested in it. That’s the way the world keeps on happening. Be interested in it.

we know intuitively and from experience that we work better in a complex interdependent task with someone we know and trust, but we are not prepared to spend the effort, time, and money to ensure that such relationships are built. We value such relationships when they are built as part of the work itself, as in military operations where soldiers form intense personal relationships with their buddies. We admire the loyalty to each other and the heroism that is displayed on behalf of someone with whom one has a relationship, but when we see such deep relationships in a business organization, we consider it unusual. And programs for team building are often the first things cut in the budget when cost issues arise. The

I sense my own place in the rhythm of the seasons, from seed time to harvest, the falling leaves and the stillness of winter. Some tasks are, perhaps, uniquely mine, not shared by other dwellers of the field and the forest. I can cherish the fragile beauty of the first trillium against the dark moss, and I can mourn its passing. I can know the truth of nature and serve its good, as a faithful steward. I can be still before the mystery of the holy, the vastness of the starry heavens and the grandeur of the moral law. That task may be uniquely mine. Yet even the bee, pollinating the cucumber blossoms, has its own humble, unique task. Though distinct in my own way, I yet belong, deeply, within the harmony of nature. There is no experiential given more primordial than that.

Above all, we should not let ourselves forget precisely what method is and what it is not. A method, at least in the sciences, is a systematic set of limitations and constraints voluntarily assumed by a researcher in order to concentrate his or her investigations upon a strictly defined aspect of or approach to a clearly delineated object. As such, it allows one to see further and more perspicuously in one particular instance and in one particular way, but only because one has first consented to confine oneself to a narrow portion of the visible spectrum, so to speak. Moreover, while a given method may grant one a glimpse of truths that would remain otherwise obscure, that method is not itself a truth. This is crucial to understand. A method, considered in itself, may even in some ultimate sense be “false” as an explanation of things and yet still be probative as an instrument of investigation; some things are more easily seen through a red filter, but to go through life wearing rose-colored spectacles is not to see things as they truly are. When one forgets the distinction between method and truth, one becomes foolishly prone to respond to any question that cannot be answered from the vantage of one’s particular methodological perch by dismissing it as nonsensical, or by issuing a promissory note guaranteeing a solution to the problem at some juncture in the remote future, or by simply distorting the question into one that looks like the kind one really can answer after all. Whenever modern scientific method is corrupted in this fashion the results are especially unfortunate. In such cases, an admirably severe discipline of interpretive and theoretical restraint has been transformed into its perfect and irrepressibly wanton opposite: what began as a principled refusal of metaphysical speculation, for the sake of specific empirical inquiries, has now been mistaken for a comprehensive knowledge of the metaphysical shape of reality; the art of humble questioning has been mistaken for the sure possession of ultimate conclusions.

Dearest mother, John Grey wrote, later that night. I am arrived safely at my new post, and find it comfortable. Colonel Quarry, my predecessor—he is the Duke of Clarence’s nephew, you recall?—made me welcome and acquainted with my charge. I am provided with a most excellent servant, and while I am bound to find many things about Scotland strange at first, I am sure I will find the experience interesting. I was served an object for my supper which the steward told me was called a “haggis.” Upon inquiry, this proved to be the interior organ of a sheep, filled with a mixture of ground oats and a quantity of unidentifiable cooked flesh. Though I am assured the inhabitants of Scotland esteem this dish a particular delicacy, I sent it to the kitchens and requested a plain boiled saddle of mutton in its place. Having thus made my first—humble!—meal here, and being somewhat fatigued by the long journey—of whose details I shall inform you in a subsequent missive—I believe I shall now retire, leaving further descriptions of my surroundings—with which I am imperfectly acquainted at present, as it is dark—for a future communication.

The culture of Do and Tell does not teach us how to change pace, decelerate, take stock of what we are doing, observe ourselves and others, try new behaviors, build new relationships.

We see Humble Inquiry as primarily about reducing one’s ignorance, making sense of complicated situations, and in that process, deepening relationships. In contrast, the primary role of helping inquiry is to influence—to teach, coach, counsel, and heal.

Humble Inquiry works only if the attitude behind it includes the desire to really hear what the other person says, to develop an appropriate level of empathy, and to choose a response that shows interest and curiosity.

The key to Humble Inquiry is to recognize when you need to know why something is happening instead of giving in to a knee-jerk impulse that not only keeps you ignorant but also creates an avoidable disconnect.

Learn to see, feel, and curb the impulses to lash out; (2) Learn to make a habit of listening and figuring out what is going on before taking action; and (3) Try harder to hear, to understand, and acknowledge what others are trying to express to you.

Successful conversations that lead to productive Level 2 relationships typically start with the assumptions of sociological equity and balance.

To be humble, to ask instead of telling, or to personize the relationship to some degree requires a higher level of trust. 6 Yet trust is one of those words that we all think we know the meaning of only to discover that it is also highly situational. In the context of a personal conversation, trust is believing that the other person will acknowledge us and tell us the truth; we trust that other person will not take advantage of us, not embarrass or humiliate us, and, in the broader context, not cheat us. We expect the other person to work on our behalf, support the goals we have agreed to, and be willing to make and keep commitments.

The goal of relationship building should be to reduce each other’s blind spots by each revealing more of our concealed selves.

In our pragmatic task-oriented culture we also learn that feelings are a source of distortion and should not influence judgments, and we are often cautioned not to act impulsively on our feelings. But, paradoxically, we may end up acting most on our feelings when we are least aware of them, all the while deluding ourselves that we are carefully acting only on rational assessments. We are often surprisingly oblivious to the influences that our feelings have on our judgments.

In the culture of do and tell, the biggest problem is that we cannot really know how valid or appropriate what we tell or are told is to the situation, unless we ask.

The time when Humble Inquiry is often most needed is when we observe something that makes us angry or anxious. It is at those times that we need to slow down, to ask ourselves and others “What’s really going on?” in order to check out the facts. Then we ask ourselves how valid our reactions are before we make a judgment and leap into action.

Learning new things can be easy when there is no unlearning involved. But if the new learning has to displace some old habits of telling, two anxieties come into play that have to be managed. First, survival anxiety is the realization that unless we learn the new behavior, we will be at a disadvantage (metaphorically threatened by extinction). Survival anxiety provides the motivation to learn, even if it is mostly nervous energy.

When we anticipate all of these potential difficulties, we are experiencing learning anxiety, which often accompanies any unlearning and is the primary source of resistance to change. As long as learning anxiety remains stronger than survival anxiety, we will resist change and avoid learning.

One might argue then that in order to learn, one must increase survival anxiety, yet this only increases our overall tension because the sources of learning anxiety do not go away. To facilitate new learning, we need to decrease learning anxiety. We need to feel that a new behavior or practice is worthwhile, not threatening, and possible to learn.

Slowing down is countercultural for many, and varying the pace to coordinate with others may seem a bit inefficient. This is a time to think about survival anxiety and experiment by testing learning anxiety. Is it possible to find a shared work pace that allows for the group to accomplish more? Is it worth it to take a time-out on a project to reflect on what worked and what did not? What may seem to be less efficient may turn out to be more effective.

Consider the question “What’s going on?” contrasted with the question “Everything going okay?” One of these questions is open and one is closed. Why does it matter? Because the second question can be answered with a simple yes or no, so it may not be helpful in building trust and openness.

Humble Inquiry is an attitude that can and should show up in different kinds of situations. The most important aspect of the attitude is situational awareness, assessing in every conversation what your purpose is and how it aligns to the situation at hand. You may just be exploring, having fun, or trying to convince someone of something; you may be trying to build a relationship or decipher what may really be going on if the situation is ambiguous or full of conflict. Everything you do next will be an intervention, even if you just stay in a silent observer mode, and will convey some aspect of your purpose to the other person in the conversation. It will help to learn to become mindful of the different consequences of what you say.

Keeping up with the content of accelerating change is really hard. Naturally we all share the inclination to focus on what we know, on our industry, or on our area of expertise, where we can be comfortable keeping up with what is changing. Yet trying to keep up with the content of accelerating change may actually be less important than keeping up with the context of accelerating change. There is a real difference between the content question “What changed?” and the context question “What is going on?” or “Why is this happening?

Certainty is the belief and adherence to a point of view, often accompanied by vehement argument. Clarity is being able to see and learn more of what is really going on, the full spectrum of dimensions that emerge as critically important as events unfold.1 We add that seeing with more clarity and abandoning certainty are benefits of a Humble Inquiry attitude.

people in leadership roles particularly need to hone these skills because this art of inquiry becomes more challenging as power and status increase. Our culture emphasizes that leaders set direction and articulate values, all of which predisposes them to tell rather than ask. Yet it is such leaders who may need Humble Inquiry most because intricate interdependent tasks require building positive, open, and trusting relationships above, below, and around them, in order to facilitate safer and more effective task performance and innovation in the face of a perpetually changing context.

Humble Inquiry is the fine art of drawing someone out, of asking questions to which you do not already know the answer, of building a relationship based on curiosity and interest in another person.

When a team is trying to solve a tricky problem of what to do next and is stuck among several alternatives, Humble Inquiry means asking, “What else do we need to know?” or “How did we/you arrive at this point?” This is particularly true when others propose something that we oppose or don’t understand.

The Humble Inquiry attitude does not require that humility be a major personality trait of a good inquirer. But even the most confident or arrogant among us will find ourselves humbled by the reality of being dependent on others, and by the sheer complexity of trying to figure out what is important and what is not. We can think of this as Here-and-now Humility, accepting our dependence on each for information sharing and task completion.

The paradox is that the main inhibitor of useful telling is often our own failure to inquire in a way that makes it safe for others to tell us the truth, or at least to share all of what they know.

building relationships between humans is an intricate adaptive process because it requires us to deal simultaneously with our biologically encoded impulses to both compete and cooperate in a cultural context that tends to favor one over the other. In our U.S. culture, it can be especially difficult to build enough trust to feel comfortable asking for help.

In Hal Gregersen’s study of business leaders who question, he found that they exhibited an unusual “blend of humility and confidence”15—they were humble enough to acknowledge a lack of knowledge, and confident enough to admit this in front of others.

The world is becoming more technologically complex, interdependent, and culturally diverse, which makes the building of relationships more and more necessary to get things accomplished and, at the same time, more difficult. Relationships are the key to good communication; good communication is the key to successful task accomplishment; and Humble Inquiry, based on Here-and-now Humility, is the key to good relationships.

Why does this not occur routinely? Don’t we all know how to ask questions? Of course we think we know how to ask, but we fail to notice how often even our questions are just another form of telling—rhetorical or just testing whether what we think is right. We are biased toward telling instead of asking because we live in a pragmatic, problem-solving culture in which knowing things and telling others what we know is valued.

But especially if you are dependent on others—if you are the boss or senior person trying to increase the likelihood that your subordinates will help you and be open with you—then Humble Inquiry will not only be desirable but essential. Why is this so difficult? We need next to look at the cultural forces that favor telling.

4 The Culture of Do and Tell The main inhibitor of Humble Inquiry is the culture in which we grew up. Culture can be thought of as manifesting itself on many levels—it is represented by all of its artifacts, by which I mean buildings, art works, products, language, and everything that we see and feel when we enter another culture.

Beyond these general points about culture, why do specific aspects of the U.S. culture make Humble Inquiry more difficult? THE MAIN PROBLEM–A CULTURE THAT VALUES TASK ACCOMPLISHMENT MORE THAN RELATIONSHIP BUILDING

The U.S. culture is individualistic, competitive, optimistic, and pragmatic. We believe that the basic unit of society is the individual, whose rights have to be protected at all costs. We are entrepreneurial and admire individual accomplishment. We thrive on competition. Optimism and pragmatism show up in the way we are oriented toward the short term and in our dislike of long-range planning. We do not like to fix things and improve them while they are still working. We prefer to run things until they break because we believe we can then fix them or replace them. We are arrogant and deep down believe we can fix anything—“The impossible just takes a little longer.” We are impatient and, with information technology’s ability to do things faster, we are even more impatient. Most important of all, we value task accomplishment over relationship building and either are not aware of this cultural bias or, worse, don’t care and don’t want to be bothered with it.

We do not like or trust groups. We believe that committees and meetings are a waste of time and that group decisions diffuse accountability. We only spend money and time on team building when it appears to be pragmatically necessary to get the job done. We tout and admire teamwork and the winning team (espoused values), but we don’t for a minute believe that the team could have done it without the individual star, who usually receives much greater pay (tacit assumption).

We would never consider for a moment paying the team members equally. In the Olympics we usually have some of the world’s fastest runners yet have lost some of the relay races because we could not pass the baton without dropping it! We take it for granted that accountability must be individual; there must be someone to praise for victory and someone to blame for defeat, the individual where “the buck stops.

We would never consider for a moment paying the team members equally. In the Olympics we usually have some of the world’s fastest runners yet have lost some of the relay races because we could not pass the baton without dropping it! We take it for granted that accountability must be individual; there must be someone to praise for victory and someone to blame for defeat, the individual where “the buck stops.” In fact, instead of admiring relationships, we value and admire individual competitiveness, winning out over each other, outdoing each other conversationally, pulling the clever con game, and selling stuff that the customer does not need. We believe in caveat emptor (let the buyer beware), and we justify exploitation with “There’s a sucker born every minute.” We breed mistrust of strangers, but we don’t have any formulas for how to test or build trust. We value our freedom without realizing that this breeds caution and mistrust of each other. When we are taken in by a Ponzi scheme and lose all our money, we don’t blame our culture or our own greed—we blame the regulators who should have caught it and kick ourselves for not getting in on it earlier.

We build coalitions in order to gain power and, in that process, make it more necessary to be careful in deciding whom we can trust. We assume that we can automatically trust family only to discover betrayal among family members. Basically, in our money-conscious society of today, we don’t really know whom to trust and, worse, we don’t know how to create a trusting relationship. We value loyalty in the abstract, but in our pluralistic society, it is not at all clear to whom one should be loyal beyond oneself.

This may seem like a harsh view of our culture, and there are certainly trends in other directions, but when we deal with culture at the tacit assumption level we have to think clearly about what our assumptions actually are, quite apart from our espoused values. The result of a pragmatic, individualistic, competitive, task-oriented culture is that humility is low on the value scale.

We take it for granted that telling is more valued than asking. Asking the right questions is valued, but asking in general is not. To ask is to reveal ignorance and weakness. Knowing things is highly valued, and telling people what we know is almost automatic because we have made it habitual in most situations. We are especially prone to telling when we have been empowered by someone else’s question or when we have been formally promoted into a position of power. I once asked a group of management students what it meant to them to be promoted to “manager.

Checklists and other formal processes of coordination are not enough because they cannot deal with unanticipated situations. Through Humble Inquiry teams can build the initial relationships that enable them to learn together. As they build higher levels of trust through joint learning, they become more open in their communication, which, in turn, enables them to deal with the inevitable surprises that arise in complex interdependent situations.7

We also live in a structured society in which building relationships is not as important as task accomplishment, in which it is appropriate and expected that the subordinate does more asking than telling, while the boss does more telling that asking. Having to ask is a sign of weakness or ignorance, so we avoid it as much as possible.

The world is becoming more technologically complex, interdependent, and culturally diverse, which makes the building of relationships more and more necessary to get things accomplished and, at the same time, more difficult. Relationships are the key to good communication; good communication is the key to successful task accomplishment; and Humble Inquiry, based on Here-and-now Humility, is the key to good relationships. Increasingly,

Describe the most energizing moment, a real "high" from your professional life. What made it possible? Without being humble, describe what you value most about your self, and your profession. If you are new to the profession, what attracted you to it? Describe how you stay professionally affirmed, renewed, energized, enthusiastic, and inspired? Describe your three concrete wishes for the future of your profession. Questions Created by the AI Listserv Community: What is really working well in your life right now? What changes have you made that have positively impacted your life? What have you seen lately that inspired you? Who was the last person to make you smile? Why? What kind of village/school/organization would you like to leave for your children and grandchildren?

Trust in the context of a conversation is believing that the other person will acknowledge me, not take advantage of me, not embarrass or humiliate me, tell me the truth, and, in the broader context, not cheat me, work on my behalf, and support the goals we have agreed to.

When we don’t get acknowledgment or feel that we are giving more than we are getting out of conversations or feel talked down to, we become anxious, disrespected, and humiliated. Humble

What we choose to ask, when we ask, what our underlying attitude is as we ask—all are key to relationship building, to communication, and to task performance.

What are you working on?” Because Ken was genuinely interested, the pair would end up in a long conversation that would be satisfying both technically and personally. Even when the company had over 100,000

Doctors engage patients in one-way conversations in which they ask only enough questions to make a diagnosis and sometimes make misdiagnoses because they don’t ask enough questions before they begin to tell patients what they should do.

The answer runs counter to some important aspects of U.S. culture— we must become better at asking and do less telling in a culture that overvalues telling. It has always bothered me how even ordinary conversations tend to be defined by what we tell rather than by what we ask.

Ultimately the purpose of Humble Inquiry is to build relationships that lead to trust which, in turn, leads to better communication and collaboration.

What you have to do, if you get caught in this gumption trap of value rigidity, is slow down – you’re going to have to slow down anyway whether you want to or not – but slow down deliberately and go over ground that you’ve been over before to see if the things you thought were important were really important and to . . . well . . . just stare at the machine. There’s nothing wrong with that. Just live with it for a while. Watch it the way you watch a line when fishing and before long, as sure as you live, you’ll get a little nibble, a little fact asking in a timid, humble way if you’re interested in it. That’s the way the world keeps on happening. Be interested in it. At

and Tell” and argue that not only do we value telling more than

Things we conceal from others are insecurities that we are ashamed to admit, feelings and impulses we consider to be anti-social or inconsistent with our self-image, memories of events where we failed or performed badly against our own standards, and, most important, reactions to other people that we judge would be impolite or hurtful to reveal to their face.

One of the most difficult aspects of jumping to a new curve is setting aside your ego. In her essay, "Shedding My Skin," Rebecca Jackson writes, "Have you ever let go of something that simultaneously protects and strangles you; something that both defines you, but also suffocates your evolution? just like a snake shedding its skin, you have to lose something critical to grow, leaving you vulnerable and exposed in the process."7 When we take a step down to gain momentum for an upward surge, for a time we will know less than those around us. This can deal a blow to the ego. In achievement-oriented cultures, it is very difficult to look dumb even temporarily, asking questions like, "Am I doing this correctly?" especially to lower-status team members. MIT professor emeritus Edgar Schein describes a willingness to acknowledge that "in the here-and-now my status is inferior to yours because you know something or can do something that I need in order to accomplish a task or goal" as the art of humble inquiry. For many, this can feel very painful. In fact, in some cultures, says Schein, "task failure is preferable to humiliation and loss of face."8

Humble Inquiry is the fine art of drawing someone out, of asking questions to which you do not already know the answer, of building a relationship based on curiosity and interest in the other person.

How Does Asking Build Relationships?

Finally, in Chapter 7, I provide some suggestions for how we can increase our ability and desire to engage in more Humble Inquiry.

About this book In this book I will first define and explain what I mean by Humble Inquiry in Chapter 1. To fully understand humility, it is helpful to differentiate three kinds of humility: 1) the humility that we feel around elders and dignitaries; 2) the humility that we feel in the presence of those who awe us with their achievements; and 3) Here-and-now Humility, which results from our being dependent from time to time on someone else in order to accomplish a task that we are committed to. This will strike some readers as academic hairsplitting, but it is the recognition of this third type of humility that is the key to Humble Inquiry and to the building of positive relationships.

paradoxically, we often end up acting most on our feelings when we are least aware of them, all the while deluding ourselves that we are carefully acting only on judgments. And we are often quite oblivious to the influences that our feelings have on our judgments.

we value task accomplishment over relationship building and either are not aware of this cultural bias or, worse, don’t care and don’t want to be bothered with it. We do not like or trust groups. We believe that committees and meetings are a waste of time and that group decisions diffuse accountability. We only spend money and time on team building when it appears to be pragmatically necessary to get the job done. We tout and admire teamwork and the winning team (espoused values), but we don’t for a minute believe that the team could have done it without the individual star, who usually receives much greater pay (tacit assumption). We

How does one produce a climate in which people will speak up, bring up information that is safety related, and even correct superiors or those of higher status when they are about to make a mistake?

Humble Inquiry is the skill and the art of drawing someone out, of asking questions to which you do not already know the answer, of building a relationship based on curiosity and interest in the other person.

Humble Inquiry goes beyond mere questioning and displays an attitude of interest and curiosity that hopefully engenders a similar reciprocal demeanor of curiosity in the other person in the conversation. You can open the door to a relationship through your own Humble Inquiry, yet a relationship only flourishes if that attitude is reciprocated.

another person in that moment. My Here-and-now Humility can by itself trigger a very positive and genuine curiosity and interest in you. You will feel acknowledged, and it is precisely my temporary “subordination” that can create psychological safety for you, which can increase the chances that you will reveal what I need to know to get a task completed and begin to build our relationship constructively.

of something, seduce, or give advice. Your sense of purpose defines your attitude, and knowing why you are in a conversation helps you to clear your head of distractions and irrelevant feelings.

Humble Inquiry is therefore most relevant when you find yourself in a conversation that is initially just transactional but develops into something more personal because one or both of you want it.

Humble Inquiry has the potential to humanize relationships across hierarchical and geographical boundaries, especially when people reveal aspects of themselves that are relatable. Of course each person’s experiences are unique. Yet the events of any story we tell reveal how we perceive things, feel about them, and act on them, which sooner or later provides opportunities for empathizing. Ideally, inquirers remember something similar from their own experiences and can identify with the storyteller. When we share our stories, we provide each other opportunities to discover important similarities in our experiences and our reactions, even as we know that experiences still differ in many ways. We have to listen and understand—this allows us to identify with the storyteller, which in turn prompts us to inquire further.

By asking a diagnostic question instead of continuing to encourage the unfolding of the client’s story, you are taking charge of the direction of the conversation and should, therefore, consider whether or not this is desirable. The main issue is whether this steering is in the interest of actual problem-solving and helping, or simply indulging your curiosity in a way that may not be helpful.

We also know how important telling is from our desire in most conversations to get to the point. When we are listening to someone and don’t see where it is going, we ask, “So what is your point?” We expect conversations to get to a conclusion, which is reached by telling something, not by asking more open-ended questions.

What you just said, that you didn’t do anything, made me realize that we don’t need an outside assessment. We just need to begin to act on those behaviors that we observe that no longer make any sense. We have allowed and maybe even encouraged some of the old rituals that we are now calling stodgy. We now need to change our own behavior to signal that many of the old ways of doing things will no longer work. So, with Ed’s help, let’s figure out when we personally have condoned what we don’t like, and in what way we could behave differently in the future.

If you are trying to develop a good relationship and feel the conversation starting to go in the wrong direction, you can humbly ask some version of “Are we OK?” “Is this working?” or “What is happening here?” to explore what might be going wrong and how it might be improved.

The power of this kind of inquiry is that it focuses on the relationship and enables both parties to assess whether their relationship goals are being met.

The more we remain curious about the other person in the current context—before letting our own expectations and preconceptions creep in—the better our chances are of staying in the right questioning mode. The more we take a collaborative helping purpose into our conversations, the more likely we are to improve the relationship.

and authority but also leads directly to the central issue of being clear about purpose. Do we know why we are having a conversation or what our purpose is in calling a meeting? When you are meeting with a financial advisor or lawyer, visiting your doctor, or being introduced to your new head of marketing, do you ask yourself, What is the purpose of this meeting? Your purpose defines the task and the kind of relationships you want to create. When you come together with another person, you jointly and automatically define the situation: What is it we are here to do? What is each of our roles in the situation? What do we expect of each other? What kind of relationship can this

...some sort of stubbornness had prevented K from taking a cab; he had an aversion to even the slightest outside help in this affair of his; he didn't want to enlist anyone's aid and thus initiate them in the matter even distantly; nor, finally, did he have the least desire to humble himself before the commission of inquiry by being overly punctual. Of course he was now running to get there by nine if at all possible, although he had not even been given a specific hour at which to appear.

On the other hand, if you spent those thirty years, or three thousand years, primarily studying mental phenomena, you might draw a different conclusion. The simple point here is that multiple theories, or multiple moments of awareness, may best be validated when they are brought into conjunction with moments of awareness or perspectives that are radically different. Whether our perspective is Christianity, Buddhism, the philosophy of Greek antiquity, or modern neurobiology, the way forward may be to overcome the illusions of knowledge by engaging deeply, respectfully, and humbly with people who share radically different visions. I think there’s a common assumption from a secular perspective that the religions of the world cancel themselves out in terms of any truth claims: Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism say many different things on many fronts, so when you shuffle them all together, they all collapse into nothing. In that view, the only moment of cognition that seems to be left standing is science, with nothing to bounce off of because religions have canceled each other out. It’s also often believed that the contemplative traditions feel they already know the answers. You set out on your contemplative path and are guided to the right answer. If you deviate from that, your teacher brings you back and says, “Not that way. We already know the right answer. Keep on meditating until you get to the right answer.” That is completely incompatible with the spirit of scientific inquiry, which seeks information currently thought to be unknown, and is therefore open to something fresh. As I put these various problems together in my mind, a solution seems to rise up, which is a strong return to empiricism and clarity. What don’t we know and what do we know? It’s very hard to find that out when we only engage with people who have similar mentalities to our own. As Father Thomas suggested, Christianity needs to return to a spirit of empiricism, to the contemplative experience, rather than resting with all the “right” answers from doctrine. The same goes for Buddhism. In this regard I’m deeply inspired by the words of William James: “Let empiricism once become associated with religion, as hitherto, through some strange misunderstanding, it has been associated with irreligion, and I believe that a new era of religion as well as philosophy will be ready to begin . . . I fully believe that such an empiricism is a more natural ally than dialectics ever were, or can be, of the religious life.”99 We may then find there are indeed profound convergences among multiple contemplative traditions operating out of very different initial frameworks: the Bible, the sutras, the Vedas, and so forth. When we go to the deepest experiential level, there may be universal contemplative truths that the Christians, the Buddhists, and the Taoists have each found in their laboratories. If there is some convergence, these may be some of the most important truths that human beings can ever access.

In some ways, it can be more difficult or risky for those in authority to question. In Hal Gregersen’s study of business leaders who question, he found that they exhibited an unusual “blend of humility and confidence”15—they were humble enough to acknowledge a lack of knowledge, and confident enough to admit this in front of others.